Ideas and imagery flood the stage in this multi-layered play set in the Fens both of now, and possibly the future.
Tom Murray’s tale brings us into the mind of Claire (Isabella Thompson), who is having dreams – maybe premonitions – about the future of her home town, and seeks desperate refuge in the counsel of parish priest Bathsheba (Layla Chowdhury).
The two actors also portray two children in the watery future of Claire’s mind’s eye, the unnamed ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ who inhabit a flooded Fens where the top of Ely Cathedral pokes out of the top of the water, and a fabled waterman (George Kirby-Smith) is a looming and dark threat.
We switch repeatedly between the cosy but unsettled conversations in the parochial house and the childish bickering of Claire’s imagined 2050, with the two world’s gradually merging into one through illustrated projected backgrounds and scattered objects that make up the set.
This structure gives Murray lots of latitude but less happily it results a lack of clarity in the narrative. There are some great ideas here and some startling imagery, including twists with Bathsheba’s husband and Claire’s past.
Elsewhere there are snippets that are more clever than convincing: speaking of the Fens one character says “the land is so flat that you only have to eyes to be accused of peeking”. The trouble is the character is a young boy, and they only get to say it because of a confected argument about being nosey.
The play’s title – a biblical reference – also crops up in the play, but it feels a forced reference, tumbling out of Bathsheba’s mouth unbidden and then never referenced again.
Although apparently just 25 years in the future, the dream-come-premonition takes the form of some dystopian scavenger-lands beset by folklore and superstition to the extent that everyone seems to have already forgotten what cathedrals and telegraph poles were. It makes for nice poetry, but less satisfying drama.
Chowdhury and Thompson are best in their adult roles, with Thompson especially gently surfacing Claire’s inner contortions through a patina of calm. Adults playing children is always tricky, and it is too forced here: more caricature than character, not helped by the tendency to put alien phrasing in children’s mouths.
There is potential for a rich and engaging story here, and some good performances, but it needs some simplification, and some nice ideas to be sacrificed in support of storytelling.
- Forgotten in the Land of Egypt continues to tour including The Maltings, Ely on 5 March and Sheringham Little Theatre on 7 March.
